[slimsag]

People also seem to forget glass bottles are very energy intensive to produce and recycle, 3.69 MJ for glass and only 0.21 MJ for a PET bottle.

The real answer is in giving people clean drinking water at the tap IMO, so many people use bottled water exclusively.

[_vdpp]

With some exceptions (e.g. Flint, MI) tap water is very clean already, cleaner than a lot of bottled water in some cases.

[rogerclark]

Have you ever had tap water from San Jose, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas?

[speed_spread]

Maybe we should also stop building cities in arid regions, expecting that remote water resources will keep feeding them.

[_vdpp]

Vegas, yes. What was wrong with it?

[slimsag]

yep - but that doesn't do much good if people overwhelmingly /think/ otherwise.

[thereisnospork]

Not to mention transportation energy. Glass bottles are ~40-50x heavier than plastic and plastic lined aluminum cans. At ~180 Billion cans per year that fuel usage adds up. It's not an accident or malevolence that plastic is so widely used, it is efficiency.